Our third and final exhibition in a series of back-to-back shows celebrating artists’ responses to the natural world. Rebecca Jewell, Sarah Gillespie, and Esther Tyson are exploring the threat of severe environmental change on the status and diversity of UK species, focussing on seaweeds, moths, and farmland birds. The exhibition will showcase works and research that has been developed during their artist residencies with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI).
Based in the David Attenborough Building, CCI brings together the university and a group of national and international conservation NGOs working together to tackle the nature and climate crises across over 180 countries. Since 2016, CCI has been embedding artists into a rich community of research, policy, practice and learning both in situ, and across sites supported by CCI’s Endangered Landscape Programme (ELP) across Europe and run a programme of collaborative events and exhibitions. You can find out more about the CCI and their work here
Species declines lies at the heart of the biodiversity crisis, and CCI hosts IUCN’s Red List Unit, a hub for scientists assessing the status of animal and plant communities across the globe. CCI’s curator, John Fanshawe, believes the Red List can be a catalyst for interdisciplinary conversations about the meaning of species loss. “Enabling contemporary artists and scientists to collaborate and share new ways of expressing the crisis surrounding extinction, notably of less well-known species, is vital.”
By exploring seaweeds, moths, and farmland birds, Jewell, Gillespie, and Tyson are celebrating such species; species of the sea’s edge, of darkness and of exhausted field margins, plants and animals that quietly play pivotal roles in our world, but invariably risk bleeding away unsung.
Exhibition opening times:
18 - 27 November
Fridays 12 - 6pm
Saturdays and Sundays 10am - 6pm